skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For me it was because back in the early days of both, BSD folk had a bad attitude.

First encounter: I wanted to try BSD, but it would only work with its own partition format. You could not have a disk partitioned for both DOS/Win and BSD. The BSD folks didn't think that was important--if you really wanted to dual boot, get a second disk.

Linux could dual boot with DOS/Win on one disk, so I used Linux.

Second encounter: BSD did not support IDE CD-ROMs. When asked when they would be supported, BSD folks said IDE was not good enough for workstations and servers--get a SCSI CD-ROM.

The problem with this was that SCSI CD-ROM drives were around $400. IDE CD-ROM drives were under $100. If you were going to make heavy use of the drive, that $300 difference might be justified. Most people were NOT going to make heavy use of the drive--it would be used to install the OS and then sit unused until it was time to install the next version of the OS.

Linux would install from my IDE CD-ROM drive, so I used Linux.

By the time BSD got to the point that it could coexist well with DOS/Win, and didn't have ridiculous hardware requirements, Linux was sufficiently mature and established that there just wasn't much point.
Don't forget London Open Coffee - http://www.meetup.com/londonocc/
if only for the mailing list :-)
What are recipe for failure! Once you get a whiff of success your hope will increase and your desperation will gradually be tamed. What happens then? You might end up in a vicious cycle of highs and lows.
Agree with OP. Heroku really needs to add a billing status screen. If you host a free app it's confusing when they will start charging you for usage and how much it will be. You can look at past invoices which shows your how many dyno hours you used, but as far as I can tell there is no place to view this information for the current month until your bill arrives.
True, except BSD had an installed base and a base of advocates back then dating back to the 1970s. BSD was the hacker Unix back when you could still credibly build a workstation around Motorola 68000 derivatives.

Now, the standard narrative here is that BSD was under a legal cloud in the early 1990s due to the USL v. BSDi lawsuit, but BSDs still existed in 1993, when the lawsuit was settled. Was the Linux marketing machine that dominant in 1993? Even before the kernel had hit version 1.0?
What ruffles my feathers is the name itself--couldn't Marco find something a bit more imaginative and perhaps less pretentious than The Magazine? Or maybe he was aping Gruber with his The Talk Show... Or is it just some uber-geek inside joke?
Marquee is alive with CSS3
Keith Campbell, Cloner of Dolly the Sheep, Dies at 58
> But the problem here is that it intrinsically classes Linux as a second-class citizen. Linux becomes the OS that can't reboot itself.

Untrue. Read the LF article linked from this. After the user interaction screen, the key of the second bootloader can be installed on the machine. After that the system can boot directly without user intervention, even with Secure Boot fully enabled.

http://www.linuxfoundation.org/news-media/blogs/browse/2012/...

> the pre-bootloader will also check to see if the platform is booting in Setup Mode and if it is, will ask the user for permission to install the signature of loader.efi into the authorized signatures database. If the user gives permission, the signature will be installed and loader.efi will then boot up without any present user tests on all subsequent occasions even after the platform is placed back into secure boot mode.
Funny, this is exactly the problem I'm working on with my new project, that I just started rolling out this week (shameless plug): https://uptano.com

I've created setups like yours a bunch of times (anywhere from 10-1000 servers) and always check EC2 to see if it's a viable alternative. The messy details of proper facilities management get old real quick. But, as you say, the math just doesn't work.

With existing companies you end up paying huge premiums to rent virtual instances on heavily shared hardware. You're giving up a proper network (with internal and external connections) and persistent high performance disk I/O. It's just not a great deal.

I'm trying to get it much closer to the pricing of doing it yourself, while keeping the convenience of not having to actually do it all yourself.

Would love to get some feedback from you, if you're willing. No email in your profile. Mine is jake@uptano.com.
Simulation of Conway's Life within Conway's Life (within …)
I thought the exact same thing as you after posting and re-reading my comment. If they come after me, I guess I'll have to open up another terminal window and hack into their car computer system and make them drive in the wrong direction, after I hack all traffic lights to slow them down of course ;)
Alex Hillman: These Five Truths
I worked at 500 Startups. This is my experience.
The authors can post their content wherever they want after 30 days of exclusivity in The Magazine. So you'll probably see most of it turn up outside of iOS.
The market that I still see isn't pre-packaged, but custom packaged. When you have 7 people flying from 3 different air ports, need reservations various restaurant for three evenings and tickets to particular sporting event. Companies that can fix all that and more with one super efficient point of contact still offer value that many people are willing to pay extra for.
Amazing. The question gets linked, gets attention, gets the answers improved (slightly, but it had only been a few minutes), and so a mod rushes in to lock it immediately.
After reading the comments I was expecting something else :)

I think one reason could be that they follow different philosophies: as end user you're going to use a Linux distribution, that includes a kernel, userland tools, applications, etc; whilst in BSD the kernel is very integrated with the userland tools and the base system includes a lot of functionality that can be completed with the ports (package system), so you're using the BSD system + some packages.

I enjoyed FreeBSD from 4.1 to 4.10 as desktop OS, and OpenBSD from 2.8 to 3.8 (web/mail servers, but firewalling mostly), and upgrading was a difficult task. I must thank to these operating systems I have the sysadmin skills I have now ;) Back then (I don't know if things have changed) you had to upgrade the system, while in Linux you could download the latest version from kernel.org, compile and install (ABI/API didn't change frequently, at least).

This different philosophy has pros and cons, and I believe one of the consequences is that Linux is more popular than BSD.
Yeah I had FreeBSD on the route before OpenBSD. FreeBSD was a very disappointing experience for me. This is some years back so the situation may be better. Back then, a lot of ports were broken. It felt that every second port did not compile. The second thing was that FreeBSD is like most Linux distributions: It tries to support everything and that is bad. If you have a problem and ask how you solve that with FreeBSD you mostly get the answer: you can use X or Y or Z. X has this disadvantages, Y was not updated for years and Z has no documentation. I also tried to try NetBSD but it panic'ed on all my machines during boot.

Disclaimer: I am an OpenBSD fanboy because it opened my eyes. OpenBSD's base system already solves 90% of my problems with exactly one, perfectly maintained and documented solution. You want a firewall? Choose between pf, netfilter or something else on FreeBSD. On OpenBSD the answer is "use pf" (which is btw by far the best paket filter I every experienced). The port system just works, is up-to-date and has good default configurations (and I never missed a package). Maintenance is very easy. It is not as easy as apt-get update && upgrade but the release upgrade (every 6 months) never broke anything on my systems (and takes just 10 minutes). Besides that, there is nearly nothing to do. Here is the bug/update list of the current release (5 months old): http://openbsd.org/errata51.html
The last thing I want to mention now is the consistency in all tools. For network configuration there is ifconfig which can just handle everything (e.g. on linux you have to use special tools for wlan). You have great manual pages. The manual pages are real manual pages with introductions to the systems, various high level topics down to device nodes etc. They are completely up-to-date and the best source for all informations.
Rebuilding a university homepage to be responsive
Awesome idea.
You should consider adopting http://freedomsponsors.org and http://gittip.com as crowdfunding platforms for that - it just makes sense, recursively so. :-)
my own opinion: http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/25426541504/stack... http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/26580091073/stack...
Two Word Games « Programming Praxis
A conservative GC requires the application to obey certain "typical" behaviors. One of those behaviors is "natural" alignment of structures. Most C compilers will align pointers in structures to the word size of the architecture, inserting padding if necessary. In your example, padding would be inserted between "b" and "c" to align "c" to 32-bits and between "f" and "g" to align "g" to 64-bits (assuming this is a 64-bit machine). So the GC can scan an object a word at a time and be sure it'll hit all pointers. Note that using compiler directives that pack structures as tightly as possible, ignoring natural alignments, can break this assumption.

As for your other questions, remember that a conservative GC manages objects allocated through it, not just random objects in the system. It can use allocator metadata to keep track of where objects start and how long they are.* It aligns objects to some multiple of the word size, and can ignore any bit pattern that doesn't point to some multiple of 4 or 8 bytes. It also knows the extents of its own heap. As its scanning pointers, it does some checks to see if a particular bit-pattern points outside of the heap or does not point to the beginning of an object. If a possible pointer passes all of these tests, it definitely points to an object. It might not actually be a real pointer, but the target is actually an object managed by the GC.

On a 64-bit machine, it's actually fairly rare for a random "int" or "double" to be mistaken for a pointer. Most "ints" are small integers, and on a 64-bit machine the heap is almost always allocated above 4GB. Similarly, the odds of a 64-bit double bit pattern pointing inside the heap out of all those exabytes of heap is unlikely.

*) This is similar to how a malloc implementation might use allocator metadata to know how big a chunk is for a free() call.
EBS Partners With PayPal To Allow Indian Merchants To Receive Overseas Payments
My tip to you would be to start fixing broken electronics, preferably stuff from the 80's (people will throw those away so you can get them pretty much for free). The parts are cheap and the circuits are usually fairly easy to follow because most or all of it will be discrete components.

You will learn a ton from this and you'll gain good insight into how other circuits work. This is the hardware guy equivalent of reading other peoples code.
Actually because of senior managment who told the company lawyers to take action. But yeah, this is the correct answer. Go figure it's at the bottom of the thread.

Linus was a 386BSD user, or hoped to be. A lawsuit stopped people like him from getting their hands on the BSD code to play with, so he wrote a UNIX clone himself using MINIX as a model. Eventually the legal situation with BSD was cleared, and BSD became free and available to everyone, but that wasn't until 1993 or so. And even after the lawsuit some people still wanted to make money selling BSD for the PC. (They failed.^1) By that time, lots of people had already shifted to Linux as the "free" available UNIX as it was readily available. Why pay for CD-ROMs of BSD when you could freely download Linux via FTP?

1. But just look at Apple. BSD is in lots of commercial products, though you might not always realize it.
Show HN: Sunsetter - find out when the sun will set over there
Costolo: “Biggest Misconception re Twitter - You Have To Tweet To Use Twitter”
Unfortunately, it's not that simple. Stuxnet showed us that offline networks can be attacked and have real-world consequences (e.g., exploding enrichment plants).

Almost all of our critical infrastructure is offline, and many of our infrastructure companies air-gap their critical networks. Yet we are all still vulnerable simply because we are using computers.
Will Watching These Sad Bears Get Fat Finally Make You Put Down The Soda?
Tickets can still be opened by searching for something in the knowledge base, then scrolling to the bottom.

Example: https://help.heroku.com/search/django+settings

That said, it is still way too difficult to find.
The Dangers of Allowing an Adversary Access to a Network
It seems to be understood that crowdfunding only guarantees an attempt at realizing an idea. Backlash will only be warranted when crowdfunding is used for anything other than an honest attempt. I think reasonable people agree that money can't buy success, so failure is and will continue to be an accepted outcome.
Dude, it's a wedding. I don't understand why people pay thousands upon thousands of dollars for everything related to a wedding they will have only once, but the fact is they do.
Nine Baffling Startup Names — Can You Guess What They Do?
This does not surprise me at all - the telecom network is unbelievably fragile.
Every time I've touched BSD I screamed in Agony.

It usually has non-working vi (beeping at the sight of arrow keys), ancient shell, colourless ls and other commands lacking about every other key I throw into them.

I understand that BSD has traditions to do exactly that that you will now defend, but those traditions are not unlike muslim africa that tell them to circumcise young girls or kill for blasphemy. Traditions are baaad, mkay? Not gonna get any new users with traditions. Admit that getting new users is not any of your priority and you lost because of that.

Technically BSDs were always interesting, but you can't bring yourself to use this awkward tool.
side comment to q, not answers (as the q is not for me): isn't engineering about creating a solution that mostly works, based on mostly formal rules and mostly proven facts, test it, start using it in production, and then MAYBE, if you have the need and/or resources actually formally proving that it will keep working in most cases or discover the cases where it will not and ad some hacks for them?

(there's actually 2 main approaches to engineering: the science/proof/theory based one and the empirical one that also uses science/proofs/theory but as a scaffolding and as a compass to realize we don't waste resources trying to do something "really" impossible)
So, basically things that gobble space are:

* Audio and video files. That's to be expected.

* Windows.

My guess is that Linus doesn't have much to do with the latter, and probably doesn't use his work computer for the former.
If you want One Overriding Idea, you would probably appreciate something like ColorForth.
This is really nice! I might actually integrate this into a current client's product I am working on.
Fantastic! I love fanboyish opinions. :) OpenBSD installation this weekend for me. I love to try out distros/OSes.
The last time the public had that sudden sense of vulnerability, the government did everything in their power to stoke those anaphylactic fires. Panetta wants more money, pure and simple, and he knows that fear of the unknown is the best way to get sound bites and the Congressional ear.

They don't want smart - otherwise we'd already be doing the smart thing.
There goes all hope to ever switching my parents to Linux.

They see a textual boot screen, they'll demand Windows back.
Face recognition is not demonstrated online yet. But it can be accessed via API. Sign up to try recognition in your application.
GNU always seemed more user friendly to me. The BSDs didn't have long options (--help, --version, etc..) so BSD commands and shell scripts always looked cryptic.
Can you read our minds? :)

I'm now working hard at integrating with octopart and pulling up the datasheet for a part is already in there, but there is a lot more ...

Next thing on the list is DRC. We already have the algorithms in place, so its basically down to doing the visualization. You can expect that soon!

You can easily download your gerber files. Just click "make" and then "download".

We have plans to build the largest shared component library in the world. Soon!

We are also currently working on hooking up to a fab and panelizing is certainly part of that. We want you to order a board with one click and receive it in the mail just a few days later. And all that at a good price!

Thanks!
Nicely done. I'm a Ruby/Sintra bod myself, but now I'm keen to play with Flask a bit - thanks!
Rovio & CERN team up for a play in the education space
Thanks for the quick answer. I'll definitely put some time aside for researching OpenBSD and see if it can fit my needs. Though you got to admit that the OpenBSD folks really don't know how to "sell" their product... I mean I know that in the OS world marketing if for the mindshare and not for the money, but that that's even more reason to do it right... their horrible website and throwing things about crypto and export restriction first really made me think they are not even remotely solving the types of problem I have...
Ask HN: 'Promoted without raise' as a tool to flattening hierarchies?
It's ridiculous. This attitude of only allowing questions that could be answered with provable and verifiable fact is going to keep stackexchange from ever moving into non-exact-science territory succesfully.

I'd love a stackexchange site on history, for example. but there's no single question on history that wouldn't get moderated away with moderators like this.

Except "Does the majority of expert believe that <question>?", of course. And yeah, that'll help.
That makes more sense, change the next pointer from the previous. Thanks!
You don't avoid Amdahls law nicely or otherwise for those problems to which it applies. It's a mathematical thing, not a technical thing.

Problems that are split up over many cores, processes or even clusters of machines always have some serial component, and that serial component determines the minimum run-time for the whole computation.

So even if all the rest of the work would be reduced to '0' then there would still be that serial component left, whatever it was.

This is not at all about playing mp3s or server loads such as web serving that are embarrassingly parallel and that can be run in a shared nothing environment. It is all about computing solutions to problems where there is some shared state between the various parts of the computation.

In computations like that the serial bits are visible as bottle-necks in the data flow, either because there is a synchronization point and some kind of reduction of the data that can only be done in a serial fashion, an ordering or some other operation that can only be done by a limited number of the total available cores. Those sections, and only those sections will put a lower limit on how fast you can solve that particular problem for a given data set.
You can think of modern physics as a bit like a cube:

1/3_____1/2/3
/| /|
/ | / |
1------1/2 |
| 3____|__2/3
| / | /
|/ | /
0-------2

0) At the bottom left corner you have "classical mechanics" - the theory that explains pendulums, bouncing balls and spinning bodies.

It branches out along the three axes:

1) Add mutual gravitation, giving you the theory of Newtonian celestial mechanics (in which gravity acts instantaneously)

2) Add relativistic effects, giving you Einstein's theory of special relativity (there is a finite upper limit to all communication, the speed of light)

3) Add quantization, giving you 1920s era quantum mechanics, as described by the Schrodinger equation.

We know how to combine any two of these:

1/2) Combining gravitation and relativistic effects gives you Einstein's theory of General Relativity. In this theory, gravitational effects travel at the speed of light.

2/3) Combining relativity and quantum mechanics gives you quantum field theory and the Standard Model. This encompasses the Dirac equation, which is a quantum relativistic theory of fermions (i.e. matter particles).

1/3) Combining gravity and quantum mechanics gives you... well, it's kind of boring and we don't talk about it much, but you get a quantum theory with gravitation, but no relativistic effects. No one really studies this.

Combining all three is the holy grail of physics:

1/2/3) Often called `quantum gravity` or the `theory of everything`, this is the as yet nonexistent theory that can explain both very small and very massive (in the sense of having a large mass) objects, like black holes or the early universe.
You need look no further than this question to see that something is rotten in the state of Stack Exchange. The question was asked in July, posted to HN 2 hours ago and locked an hour later. There is nothing flamebait-y in the answers. It's good stuff actually.

As to the question at hand: Linux was more accessible and this was back in the pre-1.0 days (my first distro was ~30 5.25" disks of SLS downloaded over a 2400 baud modem). It happened to support hardware I happened to have.

Honestly at the time it ever even occurred to me to use BSD or even that I could.
Bad karma for the socket API.
There was the 'unicorn'.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torch_Computers

based on a 68010.
"cleaner, consistent.. better documented"

I think that sums it up. Why should I use Linux?

BSD definitely can't do everything that Linux can do, but it can do most things, normally the most important things, and it can do some interesting things that Linux cannot.

For programs that only are available on Linux, BSD kernels can run Linux applications.

It's a little painful using Linux after you become accustomed to BSD. Linux is really fast, but it's too random, sometimes even chaotic, and it seems disorganized by comparison.

But for people who are used to Linux there seems no reason to switch. Linux has lots of resources behind it to keep up with new hardware. BSD will never be as quick to produce drivers.
PLEASE tell me you didn't just compare monochrome output from "ls" with female genital mutilation. Please.
> One sentence per line, please

I beg to differ: One paragraph per line, please. The natural lexical unit is not the sentence, but the paragraph. These three sentences belong together as a unit, and should be separated from other paragraphs by a double linefeed.

If someone wants to later break paragraphs into separate sentences for some reason, it's child's play, and that option is implicit in this formatting. But if someone wants to reassemble individual sentences into paragraphs, as anyone knows who has tried to reassemble lines into paragraphs (as with an e-mail in its delivered form), it's nearly impossible to get right.

Complete thoughts reside in paragraphs, groupings of sentences, not in the sentences. One paragraph per line, please.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Dont_use_line_breaks

A quote: "Do not use manually entered hard line breaks within paragraphs when editing articles."

A long list of justifications follows in the article.